San Francisco: Ian Stallings Fine Art and Design presents Colleen Flaherty, an exhibition featuring work from Flaherty's new series, Levels and older works from her Black and White series, on view December 16th - January 31, 2018.

Presenting works across a range of media and disciplines Flaherty persistently investigates the media of painting and its materiality. Flaherty's canvases are a framing device: screens and windows are transformed, and so are their values, purposes, and meanings. The Technical and the Natural. A new visual language for a new kind of viewer.

Colleen Flaherty,Visual Artist “I do not believe in resolutions. Change must be a daily routine, like calisthenics. 2016 has been a tragic year: a litany of police killings of unarmed Africa Americans, skyrocketing income inequality in San Francisco, homeless encampments next to $4500 “live and work” spaces, the dismantling of the common good, brutal social cleansing, rampant gentrification, the Ghost Ship fire. The Bay Area is increasingly lethal for artists and unaffordable for anybody who does not work for Apple, Google, or Facebook. Trump’s victory added insult to injury. I agree with British filmmaker Adam Curtis that “radical art” is completely useless if self-expression is nothing more than individualism. Art must merge with activism for real change to happen.”

'The Dissidents, the Displaced and the Outliers’: Left out in S.F.

Local duo COLL.EO shows “A New American Dream,” a 2014 set of framed digital prints of images from Google Street View.

How do you solve a puzzle like San Francisco — a city in flux, planted in a bedrock of Left Coast values and a shifting landfill of artisanal comestibles and messenger-bag boutiques?

Bay Area artists Colleen Flaherty and Matteo Bittanti — working, and playing, under the collaborative moniker of COLL.EO — are game to try. For “A New American Dream” and “City Blocks,” the collaborators turned images sourced from Google Street View of the homeless on San Francisco streets into picture-postcard-like prints and a child’s toy while reframing and pointing to the oft-seen-but-seldom-foregrounded sights of the city.

The views are further complicated as the pair turn the lens around with a self-mocking “artist statement,” stating, in persona, “I am giving visibility to invisible individuals and that makes me feel good. Look! These people camp on the sidewalk. They have tents and carts. They are a new metropolitan tribe. … All these images truly resonate with me and with my upbringing.”

“A New American Dream” and “City Blocks” appear alongside pieces by Bay Area artists such as Eliza Barrios, Leslie Dreyer and Tom Loughlin in “The Dissidents, the Displaced and the Outliers,” a transbay group show curated by Dorothy Santos. The San Francisco-born critic organized the exhibit around ideas of privacy, surveillance and gentrification by her cohort at the Bay Area Society For Art & Activism: artist Elizabeth Travelsight. The latter’s “security blankets” quilted of materials like bulletproof fabric also appear in the show.

“I think when people think of privacy, surveillance and gentrification, a lot of them will have an understanding that this show is about x, y and z,” she continues. “I had to think creatively around this, to find artists that pair well and provoke a conversation among viewers.”

Santos says she attempted to push boundaries and kick off conversation by selecting pieces like the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, an online data visualization, data analysis and digital storytelling documentation of Bay Area gentrification.

“It’s at the nexus of art, design and technology,” says Santos of the site, known for its crowd-sourced maps of displacement and a dramatic time-lapse visualization of Ellis Act evictions. “I think there’s something deep and provocative if you’re using technology to create something sensitive that a lot of people don’t like talking about? It creates talk about what do art and activism look like?”

Apparently, it looks a lot like the viewers—and the makers, as onetime California College of the Arts adjunct professor Bittanti relates his own experiences with displacement. “Aren’t we all outliers,” he says by e-mail, “in an age of neoliberalism and technological determinism?”

THE BILLBOARD CREATIVE

My billboard will be at the northwest corner of Melrose Ave and Lillian Way facing west in Los Angeles.

Take to the Streets and Experience Art in LA at The Billboard Creative Public Art Show.

This is the inaugural show from The Billboard Creative, a non-profit founded in 2014 with the goals of giving artists access to a mass audience and to make art as accessible to Angelenos as the numerous billboards that they view everyday.

The work of 14 artists from seven countries and in a range of media will be on display throughout Hollywood and LA through May 15. DOWNLOAD A MAP to the billboards, including QR codes for Google Maps for each installation - then hit the road on your own art tour or simply keep your eyes open on your daily journeys.

The show was curated by visual artist Cey Adams and art and photo curator Dee DeLara.

There are nebulous horizons playing tricks on us by promising the illusion of change while simultaneously defending the interest of the status quo. There is no sea or land that separate or unite us; there are only desires. We are all in a mirage longing for something tangible which becomes intangible when viewed upon the prism of expectations. The unlikelihood of possible alternatives will become clear as subversive practices are recognized for what they really are: hegemonic lollipops - as harmless as tooth decay and bad breath - yet can lead to heart failure.

I will be participating in The Billboard Creative's project. I will have a painting on a billboard in Los Angeles. My billboard will be at the northwest corner of Melrose Ave and Lillian Way facing west. My artwork will be on billboard from April 25th- May 15th. Check it out if you are in the area.

A visual artist trained as a painter and a sculptor, Flaherty uses her craft and woodworking skills to create works that invite the viewer to engage with art in a tactile, tangible way. She received her M.F.A. in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002 and her B.F.A. Cum Laude, with emphasis in Painting and Drawing, Minor in Music from San Jose State University in 1999. Her work has been presented in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Montevideo, Uruguay, and Pienza, Italy. In 2012 she started COLL.EO with Matteo Bittanti. Co-founder of Random Parts, an artist run space in Oakland, Flaherty lives and works in Northern California.

The publication of this catalog coincides with Colleen Flaherty's solo show PATTERN RECOGNITION (February 21- March 18, 2015) at Random Parts in Oakland.

Opening reception: Saturday, February 21, 2015 3:00 - 7:00pm Acoustic music set with the band, Uncle at 4:30pm

Random Parts is pleased to present a solo exhibition with Colleen Flaherty.

In the seminal Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man (1964), Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan stated that “An abstract painting represents direct manifestation of creative thought processes as they might appear in computer designs.” In PATTERN RECOGNITION, Colleen Flaherty’s creative thought process is made visible for the viewer. Acting as a juncture between the machinic and the natural, the archaic and the modern, she acts as a radar, a warning system. “The serious artist - adds McLuhan - is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because [she] is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception”. The inorganic is thus unmasked, unpacked: behind the screen lies a microprocessor. But chips are made of silicon, that is, sand: under the technical, lies the natural. Sand snakes leave traces and Flaherty has captured them all: lines of codes, curves, layers of information.

Technological tools incessantly reshape our world. They also redefine what it means to be human. The artist is a vigilant sentinel, because unlike others, she is immune to their subtle effects. According to McLuhan, “No society has ever known enough about its actions to have developed immunity to its new extensions or technologies. Today we have begun to sense that art may be able to provide such immunity.” What Flaherty does in her latest works is “to pick messages of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs.” As such, she is a woman of “integral awareness”, one who can visualize the technical through the artist gesture.

Flaherty’s intuitive yet highly sophisticated use of abstraction comes at no surprise. As McLuhan noted, abstract art “offers a central nervous system for a work of art, rather than the conventional husk of the old pictorial image.” PATTERN RECOGNITION is a set of maps of the contemporary visual age dominated by circuit boards. These paintings form the cartography of a new territory, both inner and outer. These paintings are not symptoms, but offer a diagnosis, a verdict. “Just as higher education is no longer a frill or luxury but a stark need of production and operational design in the electric age, so the artist is indispensable in the shaping and analysis and understanding of the life of forms, and structures created by electric technology.”

Flaherty's canvas is a framing device: screens and windows are transformed, and so are their values, purposes, and meanings. The Technical and the Natural. A new visual language for a new kind of viewer. Patterns await recognition.

A visual artist trained as a painter and a sculptor, Flaherty uses her craft and woodworking skills to create works that invite the viewer to engage with art in a tactile, tangible way. She received her M.F.A. in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco in 2002 and her B.F.A. Cum Laude, with emphasis in Painting and Drawing, Minor in Music from San Jose State University, San Jose, California in 1998. Her work has been presented in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Montevideo, Uruguay, and Pienza, Italy. In 2012 she started COLL.EO, with Matteo Bittanti. Co-founder of Random Parts, an artist run space in Oakland, California, Flaherty lives in Northern California.

What’s the matter with San Francisco is in many ways what’s the matter with our increasingly urban world. The challenges of inequality, mobility, livable wages, and affordable housing are cosmopolitan challenges, as are tensions between technology and culture. The new Argonauts, who take the wealth, skills, and connections forged in this new California gold rush to burgeoning cities experiencing tech-fueled growing pains in India and China and other countries, will also take the lessons we learn in the coming years with them, for better or worse. (Jon Christensen)

On June 16, 2014, COLL.EO was invited to participate to an international workshop on GAMING, ART, AND CULTURE in Siena, Italy organized by Professor Pier Luigi Sacco and Nicola Tripet. The event took place in the Bibliotechina of Santa Maria della Scala, located in Piazza del Duomo, a truly outstanding venue.

“Can contemporary artist be trusted with animals, living or dead? Can they be trusted to act responsibly, ethically, when their work engages with questions of animal life? Will they put ethics first or will they put the interests of their art before ethics?” (Steve Baker,Artist/Animal, 2013, p. 1)

“The glass front of the diorama forbids the body's entry, but the gaze invites his visual penetration. The animal is frozen in a moment of supreme life, and man is transfixed. No merely living organism could accomplish this act. The specular commerce between man and animal at the interface of two evolutionary ages is completed. The animals in the dioramas have transcended mortal life, and hold their pose forever, with muscles tensed, noses aquiver, veins in the face and delicate ankles and folds in the supple skin all prominent.” (Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden”, Social Text, 1985, p. 25)

“All the toys one commonly sees are essentially a microcosm of the adult world;. [...] The bourgeois status of toys can be recognized not only in their forms, which are all functional, but also in their substances. Current toys are made of a graceless material, the product of chemistry, not of nature. Many are now moulded from complicated mixtures; the plastic material of which they are made has an appearance at once gross and hygienic, it destroys all the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch.” (Roland Barthes, "Toys", in Mythologies, 1984 [1955], p. 65)

"[T]he manufacture of realistic animal toys coincides, more or less, with the establishment of public zoos. [...] Adults take children to the zoo to show them the originals of their "reproductions", and also perhaps in the hope of re-finding some of the innocence of that reproduced animal world which they remember from their own childhood. [...] A zoo is a place where as many species and varieties of animal as possible are collected in order that they can be seen, observed, studies. In principle, each cage is a frame round the animal inside it. Visitors visit the zoo to look at animals. They proceed from cage to cage, not unlike visitors in an art gallery who stop in front of one painting, and then move on to the next or the one after next." (John Berger, "Why Look at Animals" in About Looking, 1980 [1977], p. 23)

“Potentates demonstrate their power by appearing to sustain a cosmos. One element of that cosmos is a menagerie. The keeping of menageries is is a tool of high civilization, combining the desire for order with the desire to accommodate the heterogeneous and the exotic.” (Yi Fuan, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets, 2004, p. 75-76)

SPECIAL THANKS

Ruth Flaherty's help, vision, patience, and wisdom were essential to bring Menagerie to life, no pun intended. We would also like to thank Michael Flaherty and Brendan Flaherty for their precious assistance.

We are very grateful to SF-based artist Dan Valenzuela who collaborated with us with his cartoon drawings for the Art Farm etc. layout.

A reception for the artists will take place on Thursday April 3, 2014 6-9 pm at STUDIO GRAND.

“Visual intimacy is among the most honest, primal relationships we have with our perceptual world. Intuition predates the analytic mind. And it is at threat in a culture that values logic over emotion. It is at threat in an art world that values conceptualization over visual intimacy.” Jason Stopa

PAINT PLETHORA is a group show featuring artists who paint intuitively. Be it abstractions, semi-figurative, narrative paintings, photography, or video, the artists of PAINT PLETHORA are interested in creating a "visual intimacy." The artistic misfits in this show are first and foremost painters. Coming from different backgrounds, they weave their plethora of influences with the poetic, reflective and at times ironic. By emphasizing the visceral, they do not shy away from the essence of painting. These artists let their expansiveness of paint speak for itself. Exhibiting in PAINT PLETHORA are Anthony Harazin, Bernardo Palau, Carlo Ricafort, Colleen Flaherty, Dominic Alleluia, Juan Carlos Quintana, and Nelson E. Enriquez.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Anthony "Weerdo" Harazin: Harazin's gritty paintings are influence by what he experiences on the streets of his East Oakland neighborhood. He sees beauty in all aspects of life, including the "dirtier" sides of things. Originally from Chicago, his intuitive paintings can reference painting in its heyday of the 1980s or the emotive rawness of the Chicago Imagist. Harazin approaches his paintings with honest abandonment and welcomes the unpredictable outcome as if his art is taking a wild ride down International Blvd.

Bernardo "El Bernie" Palau: Palau's paintings are aesthetically pleasing but the Mexican-born artist uses this in order to "trick" the viewer into seeing his world view where things are not as perfect as they seem. Meticulously made with old master precision, Palau's work has a sadness and nostalgic aura that speaks truthfully of the dichotomy of life and death. For this exhibit, Palau will be exhibiting his recently found photographs manipulated so that only a fragmented glimpse of what once was thus questioning reality, time, and space.

Carlo "Carlito's Guey" Ricafort: Manila, Philippines born Ricafort's cryptic paintings are a master of disguise. At first glance they are abstract but upon further viewing what seems like a head appears or a chow mein chicken wing comes out of left field and knocks the viewer off kilter. Ricafort approaches his paintings or "funky abstractions" as if he is a jazz man ready to rip an improvised riff. Infused with cultural wit and a keen sensibility of cultural paradoxes, Ricafort's works are free associative visual commentaries on our complex times.

Colleen "cooldrops" Flaherty: Flaherty's abstract paintings are fierce. There is no pussy-footing or trendy tricks involved. Painting from a subconscious level, the intuitive mark makings of this Cleveland-born artist are transcendental. Flaherty's formal explorations of materials use lines, webs, dots and other forms that challenge conventional modes of perception. She creates a mnemonic mental cartography where a visual intimacy speaks of another realm, a realm inextricably grounded in the real.

Dominic "Dom" Alleluia: Born in New York City, but living in San Francisco since 1958, Alleluia is a painter and interdisciplinary artist. Alleluia describes his art practise as a "commitment to total epic art making". An inetrdisciscilplinary aryist, Alleluia uses painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and video to challenge the aesthetics of "good taste". His work asks provocatively and self-reflectively: "Is this art?" Working with mostly found materials and in different styles for over five decades, Alleluia's works are charged with a vibrant energy and directly confronts issues that matter most in disjointed and fragmented reality.

Juan Carlos "1ka" Quintana: Born on a sugar-cane refinery in Southeast Louisiana of Cuban lineage, Quintana's works references a pre-post-anti-pro revolutionary gumbo/ajiaco potpourri of image making that navigates between narratives and abstractions. Whimsical in style, Quintana embraces ambiguity and contradictions. His oeuvre is infused with irony and satire that often speaks of current events, idealogical conundrums, and lost idealism.

Nelson E. "Nelsua" Enriquez: La Habana, Cuba born Enriquez is a multidisciplinary artist primarily focusing on painting, photography and video; often combining all 3 in a single art piece. Enriquez imbues his work with an awareness of issues that pertain to both social and biographical. Through his art, Enriquez explores themes of immigration, travel, mental and physical borders, consumerism and material scarcity. For this exhibit he is showing his video, "Engravitar". The piece is about a house which was abandoned by a family who left Cuba for the United States in the early 1960s after the Cuban Revolution. The house remains abandoned till this day.